According to veteran journalist and journalism professor Erika Hayasaki, “[Y]ear after year, students crowd into [Bowe’s] classroom and the reason why is clear: Norma’s ‘death class’ is really about how to make the most of what poet Mary Oliver famously called our ‘one wild and precious life.’ Under the guise of discussions about last wills and last breaths and visits to cemeteries and crematoriums, Norma teaches her students to find grace in one another.”

In her book The Death Class: A True Story About Life, Hayasaki teaches us about Bowe, some of her students and the transformative course that has brought them together. Published earlier this year by Simon & Schuster, The Death Class also touches on a larger cultural demystifying of death that is drawing in students, scholars and the public at-large.

As the headline of a piece Hayasaki wrote for The Atlanticdeclares simply, “Death is Having a Moment.”

“There are thousands of death classes now in the U.S.,” Hayasaki tells me. “Believe it or not, a lot of them have waiting lists. It’s obviously something that’s very intriguing to students. … There are death conferences. There’s ADEC, the Association for Death Education and Counseling. There’s also the whole movement of death cafés and death dinners. There is a shift and a lot of it has been in response to the sanitization of death and the notion that we shouldn’t talk about or confront death.”

In the Q&A below, Hayasaki talks more about Bowe’s “death class” and the book project she undertook to document it. She also offers advice for student journalists tasked with reporting on issues involving death, the dying and the grieving.

Q: What compelled you to observe and report upon the class in a full book project?

A: [In 2008] I was stationed as a national correspondent for the LA Times in New York, so I was always looking for story ideas and things that were interesting to write about and also covering breaking news out of that region. I stumbled across an article written by students from the campus paper at Kean University. It talked about this wonderful “death class.” I thought it was interesting they were so excited about a class focused on death and dying. Of course, I’d covered my share of death and dying over the years as a journalist — starting when I was 16 when my friend was murdered — so I had an interest in this area as well.

Erika Hayasaki (Photo by Pat Bright)

I contacted the professor and visited her. She was very unique. She wasn’t down and dreary like you might expect “a professor of death” to be. She really had this wonderful vibrant personality. Her students were incredibly open and just riveted by this class when I visited. I wrote an article about the class, but then I kept going back. I stayed for the next two years. I also enrolled in the class and became a student so I could get that experience as well. …

For an article, I could only go so far. You only have so much length, and there were so many students with so many stories and so many lessons. I couldn’t possibly include all of them in one article. I knew there was more, much more, to be captured if I immersed myself in it. So that’s what I did.

Q: As someone who has reported on it extensively and even enrolled in it, how would you describe the “death class” to outsiders?

A: The experiential part of the class is really important. [Bowe] often takes students out in the field. We weren’t just sitting in the classroom every day. She would do lessons in the middle of a cemetery or take them to the morgue or to hospice facilities or to maximum security prisons where they would debate the death penalty with people who had actually murdered someone. Just on and on and on there were these field trips connecting the lessons students were getting in their books or discussions to the real world. …

Her lessons all pointed back to this idea of generativity. … It’s about the stages of your life, all the way from birth to death and before death, before you die, what you do, how you try to live your life and what you try to leave behind. That is really the essence of her class — thinking about what we leave behind in our deaths.

The students themselves embrace that lesson. A lot of them take it to the next level, giving back to the community in some direct way. [For example] the students in the “death class” have been involved in creating an organization called Be the Change. It was an organization that started with them making over a hospice center they had actually visited on a field trip and it has snowballed into a national program.

Q: For those of us who might never be able to take the class with Dr. Bowe, what do you hope your book can offer?

A: Just from feedback I have gotten, a lot people have found it to be healing in its own way. A couple of the writing prompts she gives in class are included in the book, so book groups work with those on their own. … A long time ago there was this belief that death was just really something we didn’t want to talk about. It was associated with everything scary and morbid and uncomfortable. The idea here is to focus on it in a more open, frank way, because of course it’s something we’re all going to deal with, we’re all going to have to confront. The more you lessen that anxiety and stereotype about it being so scary we can actually embrace it a little bit more into our lives.

Q: What is your advice for journalism students reporting on issues involving death and dying?

A: A journalist may cover a lot of death. … You sometimes over and over again find yourself reporting on the aftermath of a tragedy. It’s a job, and you have to be professional about it. But we as journalists don’t talk about our emotional process a lot of the time or what kind of toll the traumatic experiences have on us. When you start to think about it, it can be really depressing. You’re going from one car crash to one shooting to the next.

This book is one reminder for journalists to think about how we process our own emotions of death and dying. From a journalistic lesson standpoint, that will help in how we approach the people in [stories involving tragedy or death] and how we tap into our own empathy and feelings and bring those stories to light in a sensitive way.

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he also advises The Hawk student newspaper. He is the author of Journalism of Ideas (Routledge, 2013) and maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.